Columbia Pictures' Vantage Point covers every angle of an attempted presidential assassination except for the audience, and from their view, it's not a good scene. In fact, the audience's vantage point reveals little more than bad acting, forced plot twists and a 23-minute story rewound and played through six times. Columbia Pictures actually delayed the release one full year, which makes one wonder how much worse it could've been before an extra year of editing. Columbia should have held this one at least another year, as Vantage Point still needs more work before anyone should actually see it. VP is made to be an entertaining hour-and-a -alf-long ride through the views of eight separate witnesses of an attempted presidential assassination in Salamanca, Spain. The core plot itself lasts little more than 23 minutes but the movie rewinds to noon six times in order to replay the same events through different (here it comes!) vantage points. VP's gimmick is to interlace each vantage point and connect what each character sees into the final solution of finding the shooter, who turns out to be part of a much larger conspiracy. It's reminiscent of Kurosawa's Rashomon, a Japanese crime story told through multiple points of view. However, VP's story is forced, and lacked the one clever plot twist it needed not to become predictably boring.

From the start, VP is too centered on overlapping each vantage point into one cohesive story. It pushes too many random plots in the same direction to the point where it doesn't develop different stories at all; it simply introduces them and then throws them into the mix. Every character conveniently appears at just the right time and place to meet one of the others, and the ending, in which they are all brought together, is simply terrible. Thomas Barnes, the Secret Service agent tracking the shooter, does not out-think or out-react the man he is chasing. He never figures out who he is, why he has done this or even how he managed to pull off such a stunt, and he would not even have caught the shooter if not for the virtue of true luck and the fact that the movie forced all eight vantage points together at the end.

Compounding the poor writing, the acting doesn't come close to overcoming the script's deficiencies. First off, Dennis Quaid is the wrong choice as the stud Secret Service agent whom the audience needs to trust can actually save the day. Harrison Ford could have played this role, Denzel Washington could have played this role, and Kiefer Sutherland should have played this role, because, honestly, who believes Dennis Quaid as a crisis-time thriller detective/hero? Forest Whitaker was okay as Howard Lewis, literally the only character in the movie that had any actual character to him, but by Whitaker's standards, it was not a good performance. Sigourney Weaver is in the movie as a news producer, but her role is practically irrelevant and is the least important vantage point of all.

VP brings up the memories of both 9/11 and the Madrid train bombings, but does so without making any sort of political statement. It vaguely references a terrorist's perspective on the war against the War on Terror, but doesn't explore any motives of what was actually going on in the movie. With bad acting, no characters and a bad script written with its only intention being to bring different viewpoints together, Vantage Point goes down as the worst execution of a good idea since Colin Farrell starred in Phone Booth in 2002. Trust me and my vantage point on this one: Take your 10 dollars to the Mad Raven on a Wednesday. You'll probably find a better story there.